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Two trains collide head-on in Poland, 14 killed

SZCZEKOCINY, Poland —
The death toll from Poland's worst rail crash in two decades rose to 16
on Sunday as rescue workers searched the mangled wreckage of two
express trains that collided head-on at high speed.

President Bronislaw Komorowski said he would announce a period of
national mourning for those killed when the trains collided late on
Saturday near the town of Szczekociny in southern Poland. Nearly 60 of
the estimated 350 passengers on board were injured.

The battered locomotive of one of the trains had been forced upwards
in the crash, most of the carriages had derailed and some were lying on
their sides.

Officials said they could not rule out finding more bodies as heavy machinery began the task of pulling apart the wreckage.

"After the rescue operation is over, I will take a decision about
national mourning because it took place at the border of three provinces
and the victims were from all over Poland," Komorowski, who visited the
scene on Sunday, said.

"The scope of this disaster is sufficiently large to warrant national mourning," he said.

Komorowski also visited some of the survivors in hospital. The
injured passengers were taken to several hospitals in the region by
helicopter and ambulance.

More than 350 firefighters and other rescue workers struggled
overnight to extract the victims from the twisted wreckage at a remote
field crossed only by a pair of rail tracks.

"This certainly is the most tragic train catastrophe in our history
in many, many years," said Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who arrived at
the site of the crash with several other government officials early on
Sunday.

"There was no braking, only the crash, and the lights went out,
people were screaming," passenger Dariusz Wisniewski told a local
television station. "When we got out we saw bodies and wounded all over,
as well as the twisted wreckage. I had never seen anything like it."

Tusk said it was too early to speculate about the cause of the
collision, but said human error could not be ruled out. Transportation
Minister Slawomir Nowak said one of the trains, bound for Krakow, was on
the wrong side of the track.

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